In September 1910, diplomat and activist Roger Casement was sent to the Amazonian jungle by the British government to investigate human rights abuses in the forests along the Putumayo River. Casement was outraged when he discovered that nearly 30,000 Indians had died producing a surplus of rubber for Peruvian and British commercial interests, under rubber baron Julio César Arana. Casement's 700-page report of the systematic violence in Putumayo was published in 1912, touching off a firestorm of controversy—not least with Arana himself. Historian Jordan Goodman's detailed profile of a pioneering advocate for human rights is paced like a gripping thriller.

"The famous Irish patriot who was executed as a traitor in 1916 by the British government, Roger Casement had been a British diplomat whose last posting is the subject of this thoroughly researched study. Dispatched by the Foreign Office to Amazonian Peru to investigate atrocities against Indian rubber workers, Casement was the obvious choice for such a mission, Goodman explains, because he exposed Belgium's colonial brutalities in the Congo. This time, Casement encountered an opponent of wily tenacity and bottomless chicanery.... While covering the governmental machinery moving in the background of Casement's inquiry, Goodman highlights the care and savvy with which Casement undertook his assignment."—Booklist